Solitary pleasures

The female reader - naked or clothed, in bed or outdoors - has always fascinated artists. To mark the announcement of the Orange Prize shortlist this week, we asked writers to choose their favourite picture from a new book, Reading Women

Not on the same page... Roussel's The Reading Girl (Tate, London/AKG) and Vermeer's Woman Reading a Letter (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam/AKG)

Solitary pleasures

The female reader - naked or clothed, in bed or outdoors - has always fascinated artists. To mark the announcement of the Orange Prize shortlist this week, we asked writers to choose their favourite picture from a new book, Reading Women

Friday 28 April 2006 19.53 EDT
First published on Friday 28 April 2006 19.53 EDT

This beautifully composed picture, in its simplicity, poignancy and mystery, is both satisfying and intriguing. This is the room of a prosperous family. The woman is apparently in advanced pregnancy and I assume the letter to be from her husband. The map on the wall behind suggests that he is on a distant journey. We see the length of the letter clearly and the woman has at present read about a third of it, and with great intensity. This suggests to me that she has probably already quickly scanned the details hoping for assurance that all is well, and is now engaged on a second more thorough reading, as shown by the careful, almost childlike way in which she holds the letter with both hands as if the paper itself is a talisman. Her lips seem to be forming the words she is reading. Or is this careful perusal an indication of anxiety? Is the letter from a comrade of the absent husband, giving news of him, perhaps of a battle, perhaps of an illness? It cannot surely convey news of a tragedy: her face is concentrated but not distraught. We cannot easily tell whether this is good news or bad, only that the picture immortalises a moment of human emotion so perfectly that we are drawn into intimacy with the subject and share a common experience and a common humanity. We know so little and feel so much. My own reading mostly takes place in bed at the end of the day - not the most comfortable place, particularly if the volume is heavy. I find that in old age I prefer non-fiction - biography, autobiography and letters - but I enjoy re-reading old favourites, particularly Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope.

AS Byatt In the Library, 1925, by Edouard Vuillard

I love books and most of these paintings of women reading don't love books. Everything in one of Vuillard's paintings is related to everything else, and the three people in the painting are part of the world of the library bookcases, and the silence. Almost all the other portraits of women reading show them dangling a blank sheet of paper, or posed with a slim volume. After the early virgins and saints, several of the carefully arranged nude women are almost obscenely related to what they are pretending to read in their unnatural nakedness. You feel the painter gave them the book to keep them quiet and still. Here there is some sort of drama that might be in a book. The women and the child appear to be related. The elder one is trying to persuade the child to read, but no one is reading. The somewhat sulky woman posing on the threshold of the unbookish world is edgy and dissatisfied. Is she the child's mother or his sister? There's a story, and a library. And it's visually and psychologically complicated. I read anywhere and everywhere - in supermarket queues, at bus-stops, in bed hanging out over heavy books, in the loo. I never go in a car without three books in case the car breaks down. I am now built into my study by heaped books. The stairs are piled with books, which I cherrypick as I pass.

This is so sexy, precisely because it's Marilyn reading James Joyce's Ulysses. She doesn't have to pose, we don't even need to see her face, what comes off the photo is absolute concentration, and nothing is sexier than absolute concentration. There she is, the goddess, not needing to please her audience or her man, just living inside the book. The vulnerability is there, but also something we don't often see in the blonde bombshell; a sense of belonging to herself. It's not some playboy combination of brains and boobs that is so perfect about this picture; it is that reading is always a private act, is intimate, is lover's talk, is a place of whispers and sighs, unregulated and usually unobserved. We are the voyeurs, it's true, but what we're spying on is not a moment of body, but a moment of mind. For once, we're not being asked to look at Marilyn, we're being given a chance to look inside her.

One of the things to fear about death is that it will put an end to reading and learning. But seemingly not. If I am not reading in bed, I read on a chaise longue I bought in Worthing with the first reviewer's fee I received from the New York Review of Books. It has seen me through a Booker Prize list, and at least three books a week for 18 years or so. It used to be covered in green leaves and blousy pink roses, but now it's re-upholstered in broad stripes of cream and gold.

I love that period of painting so much that I wrote a novel about it. This maid is so enthralled with her book that she's abandoned her work, and her shoes, to read. What a sound priority! A writer friend of mine told her children: "I'm too busy reading to do the ironing", which is one of my favourite sentences of all time. I love that radiant patch of sunlight on the floor. My favourite place to read, when I was a child, was sitting back to front on my pony. She was a piebald mare and I laid the book on her rump while she cropped the grass. We were both entirely happy. Another blissful memory was spending a whole day lying on the sofa in a friend's house - no chores! no guilt! - and reading a brand-new hardback copy of The Remains of the Day from start to finish without a break. Such a simple thing to do, yet so difficult in one's own home. That maid has the right idea. I hope she didn't lose her job.

Ali Smith Lee Miller and Tanja Ramm by Theodore Miller

I've always loved this picture. It was taken in Lee Miller's photographic studio in Paris in January 1931; Tanja Ramm was her best friend from Poughkeepsie, who'd come to Paris to work at Vogue, or Frogue, as French Vogue was known, and was staying with Miller for some months. I think it's a great image of a unique and rarely seen intimacy. Reading with someone else who's also reading is a special agreement, you could call it an erotic pact. It's a permitted space right at the centre of togetherness, a separate but still shared silence and concentration. The picture's intimacy is very intended: it was taken by Lee Miller's father, who loved, all her life, to take heavily eroticised pictures of his daughter, and liked to rope her friends in too; "Theodore was always begging us to pose for him in different states of undress," Ramm said. (In fact, this steady though loving objectification was one of the reasons Lee Miller escaped to Paris, introduced herself to Man Ray and studied to become a photographer herself.) So, there's a real, defiant privacy about it - something as gloriously defiant as it is settled, and this combination works well for its subject. And as well as being a study of privacy and presence, it's also a brilliant study of light and dark, of held, resolved opposites. The Cocteau wallhanging behind their heads declares it practically an art, this kind of reading intimacy. You know when you can read with someone like this that you're truly at home, truly permitted to be yourself, with her or him. I love to read with someone else reading beside me - it's a profound agreement of company and breathing space, maybe one of the most intimate things you can do with anyone. I read all the time, except late at night, because reading stops me from sleeping. I read haphazardly, and usually two or three books at a time. I love when I get the chance to spend some of the day, especially the morning, in bed with a book, though I'm perfectly happy reading anywhere - especially in the garden. But in bed, next to someone (and so long as my dad's not there taking a photo), is perfect.

What I like about this picture is that she is not "lost in the book". She is thinking her own thoughts, triggered - perhaps - by what she has just read. I imagine she's read something with which she disagrees and she's formulating her response internally. The way she's resting her head on her hand suggests that she's unsure of her position; it's being tested. The book engages rather than confirms her intellect. Bed is the best place for reading because it absolves you of any other responsibilities. If I sit in an armchair to read and the 'phone rings, I feel obliged to get up and answer it. If I sit at my desk to read for "research" (ie. procrastination) purposes, I must, for some unknown reason, also look at emails, toy with piles of paperwork, go to the door to collect parcels and so on. All of these obligations vanish when I read in bed. I am fully occupied and cannot be expected to do anything else. My favourite place, however, to read is in a swing chair beneath a vast cork oak tree in the garden of our little Portuguese farm house, looking out to the hills. It stops me reading so unnecessarily fast and furiously.

The author of Reading Women, Stefan Bollmann, sees this subject as someone who does not work; I see her as someone who does. She is travelling alone, as I often do - as so many women now do, on business, to attend a meeting or give a lecture. At breakfast, in the dim hotel restaurant, she has asked for a table by the window so that she can read. Like me, she knows how important it is never to travel without a really good book, so that she will never find herself sitting bored and unhappy in some dreary airport lounge or hotel room. It still sometimes feels awkward for a woman to eat alone in a hotel, but there are also advantages, and even pleasures. At home or in the office there is always something you should be doing, but not here. At ten o'clock a car will come to take you to your first appointment of the day, but until then you are absolutely free. Breakfast is over, and you've finished your coffee; most of the plates have been cleared, but you can sit on, absorbed in your book, which you will finish much later on the plane home.

I look at this painting every day and have done so since I bought a print of it in a tatty old orange frame, in a French brocante, a decade or so ago. It hangs above my washbasin and every time I wash my face I wish I had red hair, and I wonder what she is reading. I never copy her nakedness though, I read in my nightie, every morning as soon as I wake up. Downstairs, strong pot of coffee, upstairs, back to bed, pillows behind my back, dogs asleep on bed. I read three books at once. One for fun, one for my brain and the other for self-improvement - the latter at the moment is the Highway Code, my fun book is Sarah Waters's Night Watch, and the brain is immersed in Tony Judt's Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945. Loving all three. I read at all sorts of times during the day.

Pat Kavanagh Woman Reading, 1927, by Gabriele Münter

I had to suppress a stab of proprietorial resentment when I opened Reading Women. I've been collecting such images for about 20 years. As well as prints, watercolours and drawings, I have hundreds of postcards and was therefore familiar with many of the works here. This drawing by Münter appeals to me as more than just an acquisitive collector. I love Egon Schiele's pencil line and have long wanted to encounter a woman reading by him. I never have, and was attracted to the drawing by this woman artist who is unknown to me. It has such a clear and confident line that seems to reflect the characters of both artist and sitter. She's a woman truly occupying her space. And, unlike a drawing by Schiele, if this came up for sale, I might even be able to afford it.

I hadn't seen this little sketch of the great writer Colette before. She lolls unself-consciously on her bed, ignoring the artist as his pen traces her curves. Colette reached 13 stone at various points in her life, but, bien dans sa peau, described herself at such times as "a pleasant little cob pony of a person". During her Burgundian childhood she would read and reread Victor Hugo's Les Misérables from the depths of her feather-pillowed bed; in her final years, immobilised by arthritis, she took to her "raft" (her radeau-lit, as she called it) in the Palais Royal, where she continued to read and write with undimmed enthusiasm. Reading in bed is best. The minute you get out of bed there are things to do, people start asking you for things. Sometimes they come and loom at your bedside - When are you going to get UP? But until your feet touch the ground you're allowed to read.

The young woman has worked her way through three volumes published by Garnier, which shows she's both a sticker and probably quite a speedy reader too. It also suggests that she's been absorbing the kind of avant-garde literature not easily available to a well-to-do young bourgeoise. Hence her look. It's not "dreamy", as the title of the painting suggests, but rather acutely aware that she has eaten of the tree of knowledge and there really is no way back. I'm struck by how many of the women depicted in this book feel the need to take all their clothes off before getting down to a good book. I suspect that this has less to do with how they actually liked to read (surely a bit chilly?) than how the mainly male artists - Jean-Jacques Henner, Théodore Roussel, and Félix Vallotton - preferred to imagine them reading. Having said that, I do read a lot in the bath, and one of the huge problems I find is that the books go soggy and get smeared in Eve Lom cleanser. Ideally I'd like someone to build me a contraption that would go across the bath and allow the book to remain propped upright. For some reason I've always found sitting very difficult and so, like many of the models in the paintings, I lie down to read. This is fine at home, in bed where I spend much of the time, but is a distraction in the Humanities 1 reading room at the British Library where it can annoy the other readers. I think they should institute day beds there for readers who like to read horizontally.

Joanna Trollope Standing Female Nude, 1910, by Albert Marquet

The image conjured up by the idea of a reading woman is generally comforting - a sweet face, say, illumined by the page over which it is bent: absorbed, serious, chaste. There are few unsettling depictions of female appetite or power in these paintings. And then there is this arresting surprise; a painting by Matisse's friend, Albert Marquet, of his mistress. She is completely naked. She is standing, quite relaxed, in an austere room between an empty grate and a kitchen chair, and she is reading a magazine with utter indifference to either the man painting her, or all of us looking at her. I love her independence. I love her grace. I love the fact that she isn't reading an improving book. I just wish I knew what kind of magazine it is.

I think the selection in Reading Women is seductive and delicious, but perhaps reading - women reading - doesn't have to be quite so private or so erotic (not excepting Michelangelo's maxi-muscled Sibyl). Often reading is done companionably. On the tube, for example, there we all are, side by side, 15 people with Dan Brown and some with something different. So my choice is Carl Christian Constantin Hansen, whose work I don't know, but Danish artists in the 19th century often show a delicate sense of intimate exchanges between their subjects, and here the two sisters are reading together. I was brought up in a house without central heating, so we used to sit together by the fire doing different things, and now and then one of us would read something out. In this painting, the younger girl is leaning over to see what it is her sister is so seriously absorbed in. What is her expression? Dismay, disbelief, discovery, recognition? She must be finding out something she didn't know before and her sister wants to know what that might be.

I've seen this painting often in the Accademia in Venice. I love the light on the book, the darkness, and then the greater light on the girl's face; the grace of the relationship between eye and text; the sweetness this reading moment both holds and promises. I've been reading this book in the kitchen, with a glass of the sublime Phenomena '99 and Figaro playing - loudly. Usually, I read in the bath, in bed, in the back of the car and - once spring has truly sprung - in the garden.

You shouldn't risk reading naked. You don't want someone else's words getting on your skin, lodged in those little crannies where they'll stick and pray on your mind, your sense. Certainly, don't get your naked self mixed up with a second-hand book - all those strangers' fingers touching the pages before you. Worse still would be a book that you've been given - known fingers on your pages. Even worse would be a letter. But this girl wants risk. Why else read as if she'd like a broken neck? It's tricky enough to read and write at all - our bodies evolving more slowly than our minds and still designed for action, tree swinging, sex - our heads are heavy, dangerous if held in place. Do you have any idea what she's doing to her cervical vertebrae? Her trapezius, her levator anguli scapulae, her splenius and scaleni muscles, they're all screwed and you can bet she has a bitch of a headache. And it will only get worse.

· To order Reading Women by Stefan Bollmann, published by Merrell, for £13.95 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875.